Work Text:
Hannibal crawls up from the depths of hell and onto the scorched dirt of the planet's surface on a Tuesday afternoon.
Well, on what will one day be a Tuesday afternoon, once Tuesdays exist. They don't, as of yet, but Hannibal can feel them coming, shuffling forward in a single-file line, those endless and mundane Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. The puny humans marching to the week's seven note beat, lambs to slaughter, ants to boots, gears to the grind.
He feels very cool on the ground, the flames that have engulfed him for so long finally dying away in the dirt.
There are no pitchforks in his gut, no chains around his wrists. He breathes in deeply the heat and heavy smell of the desert. He could kiss the ground, whoop in adulation. Hannibal's chest burns like holy water with love for the earth, for humanity, for the foolish woman who supplied him with the means of his escape.
The humans will one day posit the notion that their planet is the true hell. Hannibal will laugh until he can't breath at the first man to suggest this to him.
He flexes his fingers in the sand, and resolves to stay put.
The Plan, in all it's heinous glory, can wait. He will have millennia to devote himself to the destruction of innocence and the tainting of morals.
Now, he will rest. He will finally, for the first time since his Fall, rest.
The angel, on the other hand, has other ideas.
A sandaled foot descends upon his head with considerably more force than a virtuous being can believably justify. His faces crushes into the sand, filling his nose and mouth with grit. He swallows down rage like bile in his throat.
"That was decidedly discourteousss," he hisses.
He wonders absently when his tongue became forked.
"Demon, begone!" someone announces.
The voice is very haughty, full of righteous indignation, and a few decibels too loud for his liking. He expects the searing pain of a blade in his back or the agonizing burn of a silver cross pressed into his neck.
Nothing happens.
Seconds tick by.
"Whenever you are ready, madam," Hannibal supplies helpfully.
He's found that sometimes emissaries of purity and light need a firm touch, some gentle prompting. Hannibal imagines killing must be hard for them, despite the good example their father has set.
"Begone," the voice says again, a touch less confidently.
Nothing happens.
Hannibal risks moving, flattening his hands on the earth and craning his neck up and around to stare dourly skyward.
The angel, woman really, stares back at him in consternation, arms crossed defensively over her chest.
He can see up her skirt.
Her hair falls in soft waves around her face, and her eyes are the color of the sea Hannibal has not yet seen.
"Performance anxiety?" Hannibal asks.
It's intentionally goading. He expects her to fly into a rage and cast down lightning and locusts upon him. He expects fury and floods.
Instead, she heaves a massive sigh and removes her foot from his head, flopping down gracelessly in the dust beside him.
"I would discorporate you, really, if I could."
"That's very kind of you to say."
She gives him a very intent glare.
"I'll have you know, I was entrusted with St. Michael's sword."
At Hannibal's blank look, she prompts, "The blade that burns eternally with His love and casts down hellfire upon non-believers?"
"Mhmm," Hannibal says, imagining roasting succulent flesh on a magical spit of steel and never-ending flames.
"And where is it now?"
She grimaces.
"I gave it to them."
Hannibal finally sits up, absently brushing off his tunic.
"Them?"
"Over there."
The angel points across the desert, far off in the distance. Two tiny figures shimmer in the heat, trudging through the dunes and kicking up clouds of sand. Something bright glints at the taller figure's side.
"I felt sorry for them," she whines pitifully.
"A conscience is a terrible burden to have," Hannibal says, and pats her knee as sympathetically as he is able.
She looks at him.
"Did you lose yours, your conscience, I mean, when you fell?"
Hannibal thinks briefly, painfully, about Mischa, safe and warm Up There, her wings still snowy white.
"I prefer the term 'misplaced.'"
She hums.
"Misplaced implies hope of recovery."
He harrumphs disdainfully.
"My only wish is to serve my master in his dark and glorious purpose."
The angel picks at her teeth with a well manicured thumbnail, seemingly very put-out.
"Yeah, well my master calls me Alana."
Hannibal inclines his head.
"Alana. A beautiful name. It means 'offering', did you know that?"
Alana slowly turns behind her to stare at the steadily receding couple.
"Huh," she says, then, "And your master calls you...?"
"Hannibal."
"Hannibal means 'grace of God,' you know."
"Huh," he says.
They watch the figures disappear into the undulating haze of a mirage.
The wind howls forlornly around them, and high in the sky the red sun sinks lower.
"Do you ever wonder whose side you're really on?" she asks.
Hannibal, at her back, says "Yes."
-
They avoid each other for years, cutting wide paths around each others' sphere of influence, leaving towns once the other is in a ten mile radius.
Hannibal doesn't think she's afraid of him, really. He likes to imagine she's wary of how easily they could become companionable.
The only two immortal beings on a planet full of lights quick to burn out.
He pities the humans, at first. He knows one day the sentiment will run out, like sand sifting through his fingers.
Exhausting, to love something ephemeral.
-
He likes Cain, immediately. Those big strong hands, the dark eyes. They walk together for hours, discussing the sky, the mountains, the man's desires, his aspirations.
Hannibal's mouth runs dry the day Cain's quiet voice admits his thoughts have recently turned to murder. Not once had Hannibal influenced him to sin.
Cain kills his brother and all Hannibal can feel is horror and guilt.
He gets a commendation.
-
She discorporates him in Egypt, out of sheer helpless anger, really. First born sons lie dead in the streets, and Hannibal finds he doesn't like it any more than she does.
The afternoon she finds him, Alana buries a blade in his chest before he's even had time to say hello.
She's weeping, gasping as his vessel bleeds out at her feet, "Make him stop, please make him stop."
It is only after he returns to Earth that he realizes she wasn't talking about Ramesses.
-
He can feel the echo of her pain across the mountain ranges the day Delilah dies.
The betrayer, the seductress. The woman whose hands dripped locks of hair like blood. Alana had loved her.
Years later she will tell him of her wild spirit, of how brightly she burned.
Alana never learns to keep the humans at arms length.
-
They don't start any wars, but wars begin regardless of their actions. Hannibal believes that if he left humanity alone entirely, his commendations would continue to roll in. Curiously, Alana shares the same sentiment about her own work.
-
The Arrangement arises some time in the fifth century. The Roman Empire has just collapsed, and when Hannibal sighs he can hear the Roman peoples' screams on his breath like a death rattle. He finds her at the banks of the Rhine, the water as icy as her gaze.
"Might I suggest a wager?" He says when he draws near.
She does not turn around.
"The humans, the teaming, screaming mass of humanity will always tend towards chaos. This is ineffable."
"Don't talk to me about ineffablity-"
He continues over her smoothly, "Mankind, pleural, will rend itself to pieces, forever at war. Man, single, is a battle that can be fought. Man can be won."
Alana's eyes drag begrudgingly from the frozen river to the rocky crags of his face.
"Might I suggest a wager?" he says again, and this time she turns to face him fully.
-
They ignore the Nika riots in Constaintinople, Alana barely blinks when she hears of the massacre.
Instead, they battle for Mordred's soul.
Alana loses of course, terribly, and she doesn't speak to him for years. He thinks she might have been enamored with Arthur. This is only the first of the very long line of good men she will watch die.
-
Hannibal meets a fair ruddy skinned man, a boy really, in a market by the coast. He smells of straw and the thick scent of the earth.
He puts his hands on the farm boy and days later the villagers burn him alive. Hannibal razes the town.
This is the first time he realizes that in his presence, humans decay.
-
He spends centuries alone. There is a black pit yawning wide inside him. He keeps grabbing at humans for purchase, but they break apart in his hands and he falls.
-
They bet on Gengis Khan, when they stumble upon him as a child. Alana spends weeks influencing him to share his toys, to play nicely with the other boys in his village. She rewards even the smallest kindness with sweets.
All Hannibal has to do is give him a small knife and a cat leashed with a length of rope. He does the rest.
Alana buries the cat alone in a shallow grave by the river bed.
When Khan massacres villages by the hundreds, Hannibal will think about the cat, and how it meowed so sweetly and rubbed against his legs.
He will wish he had buried the creature himself.
-
They sleep together after Avicenna is born, so high is she with the flush of victory.
They stay in bed for a full month, and Hannibal memorizes the lines of her body, the soft curves, the sharp angles. She tells him they must stop, that what they're doing is blasphemous. He whispers real blasphemies into her sweat soaked skin so she knows the difference.
Rejecting God is the only way he knows how to escape. She leaves him in Italy. He drifts.
-
During the Great Famine, he has his first taste of human flesh. He lives amongst the people, hungers with them.
They kill one of their own for meat and when offered a charred morsel he does not decline.
His mouth waters for days afterwards, salivating with the craving.
Alana meets him in a hut on the outskirts of an empty farm, nothing but waves of brittle grasslands for miles. She knows what he has fed her after the first bite, and the look on her face still tears at him, centuries later.
She slaps him on her way out the door.
Hannibal starves himself for weeks afterwards, but it is too late.
He has acquired a taste.
-
They both consider Bernard of Clairvaux a loss.
-
In 1585, Hannibal accompanies Raliegh to North America. Raliegh establishes a settlement in an area that will one day be called North Carolina, among towering trees and babbling brooks.
Hannibal stays behind, welcomes the new settlers to Roanoke with open arms.
When the governor returns to England, Hannibal remains with the colonists.
He has a very grand feast.
After the village is empty, he stands in the town square and howls like a wounded dog.
It is very quiet without the children's laughter.
He banishes himself to the woods, as penance. The natives think he is a creature of lore. He comes upon a woman kneeling by the river one day.
Hannibal only understands two words of her terrified gibbering: "hungry ghost."
-
He gloats for days after he beds Oscar Wilde, sealing his fate. Several years later, he finds himself curiously affronted when Alana resolutely remains mum about her month in Cabo with Marlene Dietrich.
Every once in a while, she does manage to actually win a celebrity.
-
After centuries, Hannibal decides the nomadic life is not for him. He wants roots, a place where he can ground himself. He chooses Baltimore, for its dedication to the arts. He is not overly surprised when Alana inconspicuously and with no fanfare moves in a few miles away.
Over wine one evening, they decide to become employed members of society.
"To join the rat race," Hannibal says.
"To give back to the community," Alana insists.
She takes the long route, moral to the bone, attends a university and works diligently towards her degree for years.
Hannibal is an MD the day he decides to become a doctor. This is why he takes on the role of her mentor as she nears the end of her residency.
"I can't believe I have to claim you mentored me," she bemoans, slicing up tomatoes in his kitchen one day.
"Would you rather I claim to be your mentee?" He asks, and she says "Touché," aghast.
-
If Alana knows what he does in his free time, she gives no indication. He has always had a creative streak, and he only kills those who offend his sensibilities, lowly pigs whose auras are already irreversibly blackened.
She doesn't eat the meat when she comes for dinner, so he supposes she does know.
The Ripper comes about mostly by accident, but he finds he takes a liking to fame. It's nice, he reflects, to finally receive some recognition.
Alana begins freelancing for the FBI and she laughs when he suggests she pass his name along.
"I'm sure you'd find it very dull," she says.
-
Will Graham has a purple aura, a lovely liac shade that gives his skin a pleasant ethereal glow. He's a creature of neither hell not heaven. Hannibal finds he cannot tear his eyes away from him.
In a sunlit field, Will dissects the Ripper's gruesome message with startling perception, and Hannibal rewards him with her liver in a protein scramble.
He kills Garrett Jacob Hobbs and shakes so violently he cannot press hard down enough to staunch the Hobbs' girl's bleeding.
While Hannibal's hand is clamped over Abigail's slit throat, Hannibal looks around the room at the three of them and deep in his mind the suggestion of a plan begins to bloom.
-
"Care to make a wager?" Hannibal asks and she shuts him down immediately.
"No, Hannibal. Leave Will Graham alone."
"Alana, he is a virtuous man, surely you have enough faith in your abilities to believe you could emerge from our bet victorious."
"I know that look," she tells him.
He stirs creamer into his coffee, watches the black turn to a rich caramel color.
"I will sweeten the pot for you then, Alana; if you win Will Graham, I will give you Abigail Hobbs."
She looks up from her Danish sharply, and he knows that he has her.
-
He begins to recognize the effects of his presence immediately. The confusion, the dark, intrusive thoughts. His influence has crept into Will's mind and taken roost.
Some long dead part of Hannibal wants to spare him the contamination, but the feeling of being seen is intoxicating, it blots out everything else.
Hobbs whispered, "See? See?" to Will Graham as he lay dying.
Hannibal is screaming the words at Will too, but he can't seem to hear him.
In his office, he moves toward Will and his body language speaks volumes.
It is only a matter of time, and Hannibal has all the time in the world.
-
Before he kills his victims, he reveals his true form to them. He likes their mindless screams, their all encompassing horror.
The oldest part of them recognizes what he is and where he is sending them. The terror taints the meat, but he finds it is worth it.
-
Abigail is so easy to corrupt. Her malleability comes from a very wounded place, a place of deep loneliness and isolation. Hannibal reaches inside her mind and what he touches is familiar.
-
His life narrows down to two things: time spent with Will Graham, and time without him.
One is far preferable to the other.
He receives an inquiry in the mail, a politely worded investigation into the state of his mind. Has he perhaps grown soft and sympathetic to humanity's plight? Is a sabbatical somewhere hot in order?
He ignores it; opens the door to his study wide every week at seven sharp.
There is a spring to his step, a lightness in his chest. As Will Graham falls apart, Hannibal finally knows what it is to be alive.
-
He frames Will Graham out of self preservation. The powers Down Below send two demons poking around, and he realizes that his joy has grown so great its percolated downwards.
Will glares at him through the bars of his jail cell and later all he can taste is bitter, bitter in his mouth. It's not from the wine.
-
Alana comes to him, asks him for pity, for mercy. She looks in his eyes and perhaps sees for the first time what he has become underneath.
She knows it is too late for Will. He derives pleasure from watching her carefully extricate herself from the situation.
One day Hannibal visits her apartment and finds it empty.
She has finally realized it is a folly to bet against the house.
-
The days stretch long. At night Hannibal sits by the fire and there is a fatigue in him.
He finally feels his age.
-
Will returns to therapy. There is a hardness in his eyes, a clarity of vision. He meets Hannibal's gaze with a heavy understanding.
After their sessions, Hannibal burns.
Will Graham brings him a body and he puts his hand on Will's cheek, drags his eyes down to his mouth.
He's so god damn hungry.
Will takes step back, but there is hesitation in his movement.
-
The night after he smells Freddie Lounds on Will's skin, he takes him.
At dinner, Hannibal offers Will a chance of redemption, an opportunity to come clean about his betrayal. He does not capitalize on Hannibal's kindness.
The disappointment in his gut feels like a knife.
Hannibal serves raspberry trifle for dessert, and when he licks the juice from his lower lip, the temperature in the room rises. Gooseflesh prickles up his arms, and he raises his eyes to Will's across the table.
The atmosphere is suddenly oppressive, so thick it's difficult to draw an unlabored breath.
Will's stare is very dark, and his lust is a palpable scent in the room. His nostrils flare, his chair creaks when he shifts in his seat.
Hannibal feels off balance; he had not noticed when this desire took hold of Will, when it become conscious in his mind.
Hannibal stands and moves behind Will to clear his plate from the table with weak knees. Will bats the china from his grip and it shatters on the floor, loud in the deafening silence of the room.
He stands and takes Hannibal's face in his hands, kisses him open mouthed, rough and hard and mean.
Hannibal's control slips and he slams him down on the table and bites into him, drags his teeth down Will's throat and presses his fingers into his skin with the intent to bruise. Hannibal fucks him on the mahogany dining set, the silverware rattling with each thrust, and Will moans long, loud, filthy.
"Oh god, oh god, oh god-"
"Yes," Hannibal hisses, "that's right Will, say my name-"
-
He kills his little family because Will Graham worships the false idols of law, order, and morality.
He understands for the first time why He banished the angels that refused to bow to his commands. He understands now that someone must always pay for the sins of the wicked, and he understands which part he has been cast in their little play.
People must always have someone to root against.
Hannibal kisses Will when he buries his blade in his stomach.
He feels they should be in the garden of Gethsemane, enveloped in the sickly sweet smell of dying flowers and stunned by the thunderous clap of soldiers' boots against the hard, dry earth.
Hannibal does what he is here to do.
He wonders, later, if Will gets the reference.
~